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One of the big movements in gaming these days, albeit one that’s only occasionally talked about, is toward user-generated content. Gone are the days when mission editors were arcane tools only the most dedicated could learn to comprehend, much less use. And so I present my own recent adventures in user-generated content, courtesy of Sucker Punch’s inFAMOUS 2 and its mission creation tool. Also, I plug my mission a little so you’ll go and play …

Sylvari week has ended and for those of you who haven’t yet delved into the delights offered by ArenaNet, I suggest you head on over to the blog for a five day feast of information covering the design and lore, plus some delicious wallpapers. The redesign has been well received by both press and fans and it was unquestionably brave of ArenaNet to redesign an entire race so deep into the development cycle. And yet …

I first met Amanda Lange about two years ago – until quite recently, she taught Game Design at the International Academy of Design & Technology in Detroit, Michigan, and I had the honor of being invited to speak with one of her classes. I don’t think Amanda expected me to ramble on for an hour and a half, but then again… she didn’t know me at the time. Now she does and is correspondingly more wary.

A longtime member of the International Game Developers Association and supporter of many local efforts and endeavors, Amanda’s moving to a new state soon on account of getting relocated, so we’ll miss her at the Detroit IGDA meetings. In the interim, though, she kindly offered to put together a Celebrity Guest Editorial on a subject that I think many Tap readers have pondered over the years. Take it away, Amanda!

Of the few forums I follow with fervor, I happened to be at the Maniaplanet Forums at exactly the right time when one of the devs started playing the dev-titled “stupid games” to give out beta keys to test Trackmania²: Canyon (“Canyon”). It was really a fluke, and as I entered the first beta round I knew I was an interloper. I have beta tested countless MMOs. This was different. I felt instantly out of my …

When my brother Lewis and I were little we used to play ‘army’ a lot. It turned out that other kids called it ‘war’. We had a grandad with a shed full of wood-working tools and it wasn’t unusual for him to kit us out with wooden guns, swords and shields to act out our pretend fighting (I even got him to make a wooden brick once — yeah I know, I have no idea …

Typically I don’t publish my Culture Clash columns here until they’ve been run at the IGDA website, but honestly, in the last few months I’ve had no fucking clue what’s going on over there. So I present to you my latest – sort of, in that it was filed on June 10 and I haven’t heard anything from an editor yet, which is uncommon because my editors there are apparently of the opinion that I have no professional writing experience whatsoever – with all hopes that it pleases you.

This one comes on the tail of a column that… well, it caused some chaos, let’s put it that way. And while its final published form didn’t spark any particular controversy, it was quite an adventure for those behind the curtain. As such I went for a more innocuous, if not entirely cheery, thesis this month. Enjoy!

It’s no secret that the Nintendo 3DS hasn’t exactly been lighting up the cash registers since it launched back in March this year. With its main USP still seen by many as an unwanted gimmick and under increasing pressure from iOS and mobile platforms, this particular $250 dedicated handheld was always going to be a difficult sell. Even judged by already tepid expectations, the 3DS has endured a rough start to its life on the market, struggling to sell units, and with only Super Street Fighter IV and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time – both ports of existing titles from various points in the last 10 years – doing the business on the software front. When Sony matched Nintendo’s launch price for the shinier, more powerful and altogether more striking PlayStation Vita, Nintendo’s reaction almost became an inevitability.

Starting from 12 August, the 3DS will now cost just $169 in the US, £130 in the UK and 160 Euros in Europe.

Back in ’03, a small French game development company, Nadeo, created a racing game within a system designed to allow people to easily build and share a plethora of community-created content. This Trackmania was a platform with so many outlets. It had fresh racing gameplay distilled down to bare essentials. It had a track editor that worked like Legos, including various brick themes. It had a car painter to paint and place stickers in real …

Today I learned there’s such a thing as the Video Privacy Protection Act, a piece of 1998 legislation that apparently requires information about customers’ rental habits be kept secret by those doing the renting. Today it’s a thing because Netflix wants to integrate with FaceBook, and it can’t because of the law’s wording.

So because I don’t actually own an Xbox 360 (nor an Xbox, for that matter), I’ve always had to find other ways to play the (very few) exclusive games in their libraries that I cared about. So it was that I find myself blitzing through Halo: Reach on my brother’s console during a recent trip home. Because, seriously: Halo. What began rolling around in my brain as a review of Reach quickly turned into something …

Here at Tap, we occasionally are honored by guest editorials – from game industry celebrities, from people who are awesome, from others. This one falls into the latter category. You all know Armand K, one of our regulars, and a writer for Alliance of Awesome fellow BnB Gaming. No one really likes Armand; we sort of tolerate him. His drinking problem and general bad manners have caused more than one Tapper to grit their teeth …

From Dust is one of the summer games I am most looking forward to with Rock of Ages and Trackmania 2 following in chronological order. From Dust is a multi-platform game that advances the god game genre to heights of new beauty. The creator, Eric Chahi of Another World and Heart of Darkness fame, says that From Dust is most like a spiritual successor to Populous. It is one of the most beautiful games I …

Today is July 12, 2011. An auspicious day for fans of A Song of Ice and Fire, which nonreaders may know better as the first-season-just-ended-to-great-acclaim HBO series Game of Thrones. The fifth novel in the (planned) seven-volume cycle, A Dance with Dragons, arrives today, after a wait of seven years.

On August 29, 2005 Hurricane Katrina left a trail of destruction and flood waters across New Orleans and the surrounding area, causing just short of 2,000 deaths, billions of dollars of damage and a clean up operation that continues to this day. Six years later and many parts of New Orleans remain in disrepair, standing as reminders of a tragedy which threatened to wipe an entire area of the United States off the map. One …

Over the last couple of months I’ve been researching the new computer I’ve been wanting for years and years, partly explaining my absence around here lately. You hear that Mat C? Research. Y’know, legwork, toil, hardship. None of your blatant lifting nonsense. Anyway, the other week after finalising my build, ordering the parts and receiving them, I set about building the thing. Several hours and a couple of hiccups later I was the proud owner …